I harbor ill feelings towards automatic car door locks that are activated by a key fob. I wish they had not been invented.

It is simply rude to park your car, walk away half a block, half the parking lot, whatever, then HONK! Such noise for your own convenience and just in time for a innocent passerby to be jolted shitless. Please, just lock your vehicle manually and silently. Be a good citizen.

Today my ears were assaulted thusly four times on a walk the distance of 12 blocks.

I like to sleep with the window open. There's a parking lot below that serves the art museum. Apparently they get an early start over there. When I'm awakened with HONK! my impulse is to lob a cinderblock down on the offending vehicle's windshield. Problem with that plan is, I don't know which vehicle it is plus I don't have a cinderblock.

My orchids live on the porch, where I pay them very little attention - water if it's not rainy; if I remember once every month or two, they get a little fertilizer in their drink.

The weather has been warm and wet this fall; every day we reach the upper 80s and low 90s, and the nights aren't below the mid 70s. Three of my orchids are budding or blooming right now; one has five stems covered with blossoms.

Friday, we are expected to drop suddenly to the low 50s, upper 40s. Fall really just falls, swoop, in the deep South. It will bounce back to being warm within days. I just hope my orchids hold tough for now. But that's the thing with orchid blossoms; they're a passing pleasure.

When I'm awakened with HONK! my impulse is to lob a cinderblock down on the offending vehicle's windshield.

Something like that happened when I was in college. Some nitwit with a proximity alarm on his car -- cranked up to some ridiculously oversensitive setting -- parked it near a bunch of the freshman dorms during finals week and then walked away, presumably to take a final.

By the time he got back, two hours later, the alarm had been going off continuously for about an hour and fifty five minutes. By that point the car had been keyed, shaving creamed, had a rock thrown through the windshield, and its tires slashed. Then the guy got a noise citation from the cops.

What you've got is a sidler at work. Give him a pack of Tic-Tacs. Well, maybe not.

From the "Merv Griffin Show," one of the best episodes of Seinfeld:

Elaine's new co-worker is a real "sidler": he moves silently behind people... He causes Elaine to spill coffee that creates a stain that looks like Fidel Castro.. Elaine schemes to out-sidle the sidler who might be sidling her out of a job... Elaine gives Tic Tacs to the sidler to make him noisy; unfortunately the sound annoys J. Peterman, which reminds him of an old Haitian torture.

“Captain’’ Lou Albano, who became one of the most recognized professional wrestlers of the 1980s after appearing in Cyndi Lauper’s “Girls Just Want to Have Fun’’ music video, died yesterday. He was 76...With his Hawaiian shirts, wiry goatee, and trademark rubber bands hanging like piercings from his cheek, Mr. Albano was an outsize personality who, in a career spanning nearly five decades, was known as much for his showmanship as for his talent in the ring.

Nobody tell the TSA, but last month someone tried to assassinate a Saudi prince by exploding a bomb stuffed in his rectum. He pretended to be a repentant militant, when in fact he was a Trojan horse: "The resulting explosion ripped al-Asiri to shreds but only lightly injured the shocked prince -- the target of al-Asiri's unsuccessful assassination attempt."

For years, I have made the joke about Richard Reid: "Just be glad that he wasn't the underwear bomber." Now, sadly, we have an example of one.

Lewis Page, an "improvised-device disposal operator tasked in support of the UK mainland police from 2001-2004," pointed out that this isn't much of a threat for three reasons: 1) you can't stuff a lot of explosives into a body cavity, 2) detonation is, um, problematic, and 3) the human body can stifle an explosion pretty effectively (think of someone throwing himself on a grenade to save his friends).

Pitcher plants at Olbrich or at the Botany Greenhouse? The Botany Dept has a wonderful collection of carnivorous plants- beautiful pitcher plants of all sizes and colors, and lots of Venus flytraps. I like the quietness and secret feel of the space as well...

This story disturbed me. Apparently, without meticulous maintenance, our soldiers' rifles jam in Afghanistan. The bad guys' AK-47s just keep on working.

Weapons failed US troops during Afghan firefight

Oct 11, 8:28 AM (ET)

By RICHARD LARDNER

WASHINGTON (AP) - In the chaos of an early morning assault on a remote U.S. outpost in eastern Afghanistan, Staff Sgt. Erich Phillips' M4 carbine quit firing as militant forces surrounded the base. The machine gun he grabbed after tossing the rifle aside didn't work either.

When the battle in the small village of Wanat ended, nine U.S. soldiers lay dead and 27 more were wounded. A detailed study of the attack by a military historian found that weapons failed repeatedly at a "critical moment" during the firefight on July 13, 2008, putting the outnumbered American troops at risk of being overrun by nearly 200 insurgents.

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Nor have I received any compensation, whether monetary, product, or otherwise, for this or any other message containing the terms, cow, mat, mats cowmats, #cowmats or other such terms.

Cows, mats, cowmats and #cowmats shuld be used with adult supervision in a properly enclosed, lighted and ventilated code-compliant structure, and on a properly constructed sub-floor of cementitious materials.